NYC Highline
Was reading about the Buddha on the highline created by Tuan Andrew Nguyen, and took a photo of the image from Tricycle. Was going to use it, but then learned not a good idea. I’ll have to go take a photo of this. There are many images of the Buddha I love. I’ve been meditating since I was 17. I learned an early age that using drugs wasn’t a fulfilling life, and I had to replace it with something and God wasn’t going to do the trick for me. The God I came to know as a kid was fake and that’s not to say that God is fake for many people. God is very real. For me, the Buddha isn’t even real. The food is not supposed to be real at least for me. The Buddhist supposed to be a reminder of how to be a good decent person. The boot is there a reminder of full democracy through being a decent person that is you treat people with love and kindness which results in respecting others and being there for others. And also doesn’t allow you to put people down or be better than other people. It is very radical in many ways radical in the ways that we need not this radical right craziness we all are suffering through currently.
Nguyen’s Sculpture set a reminder of impermanence and how things don’t last. Are there are many steps backwards before their steps forwards as well. Fundamentalism from all different avenues wipes out the human race. There’s no way to make everybody believe the same way and that’s what these people are doing. They are trying to force others to believe the way that they believe and that’s a form of violence. It’s a form of violence for people to go through the streets asking a few I’ve accepted Jesus and in if you haven’t accepted Jesus, that you are basically going to hell. That is not what Jesus intended that is not what Buddha would ever intend either. We have our own paths and we have to follow them. God is everywhere everyone and everything. God is the unknown. It is what we experience when we do not believe in God and try to understand how we were created. The part that we can never understand is God.
It’s what all people have been doing Since they could reflect which is mollifying fears and anxieties through creating patterns and Knownness. What we cannot understand, we create gods for. Our anthropomorphic God is very unreal. Another Anthropocentric view that continues to harmless. We have to wake up and see the universalism and everything to see also that everything is different and everything is the same at the same time and also that nothing is the same and nothing is different. It’s sort of again understanding life through Buddhism, and in this way, the Zen way of pointing that you can point out something, but you can never fully understand it, and you can hint at it, but you’re never fully getting the full gist of what you’re hinting at. Everything has un known us in it, and as we try to know it, we sometimes try to know it to the point of projecting our own existence into it to the point of violating otherness, which also violates us. We’re constantly violating each other through not giving much thought to what we cannot understand. Again, pointing back to Buddhism, that everything we attempt to understand, leads us back to nothingness or emptiness. Nothing has a soul. Nothing has a self, nothing has nothing. We can call that a soul. We can call that self, but it doesn’t necessarily make it as such
The litany of thoughts coming to me after seeing his sculpture is why artist so powerful. It helps us understand what we are and what we are not what others are and what they are not. That sculpture that he is alluding to was blown to pieces in 2001 by fundamentalists in Afghanistan. I don’t even necessarily like pointing the finger at Afghanistan because fundamentalism the toxic fundamentalism is surfacing everywhere and the more device of our countries become the more fundamentalism spreads. This seems to be the issue with algorithms and technology. Currently, we are reading the same shit over and over again that just confirms our own biases even makes those biases stronger. This causes more hate, and this will cause more violence as well. We need information that connects us not destroys us. Some people would say this isn’t very democratic. The ironies of life. In order to have democracy, we need to have the right views And those right views our ones that are brought on by reflection and that reflection is about the greater Good. What is the greater Good? Every society makes up shit about this. Those empower make up the greatest shit about this. We cannot have views that just serve a select few. We also cannot have used that we think are right and impose them on everybody else, leading to many many complexities and misunderstandings and failures.
Maybe all societies are supposed to fail in the end that we can’t hold many views at the same time because when we try, it seems that we are constantly returning to singularity or returning to imposing one will on everyone. One idea on everyone one concept one whatever. And that’s what it is because it’s somewhat arbitrary. If many people think it, they believe that they can enforce it, and those many people have to be in a position of power. They even make up shit sometimes in order to keep them in power, and they will fully believe it is for the greater Good and that’s how society is supposed to be to make themselves feel better. Just think of all of Trump‘s warped views. I really hope he’s not that warped inside but what he says indicates he is not a well man and it’s so unbelievable that this unwell man has so much power and That we have come to this point. It is even hard to point the finger at who’s at fault. Maybe we all are but also the mechanism is working in the machine in the powerful centralized billionaire machine is manufacturing this shit. The propaganda machine is having its impact.
What a sculpture this is! This is what art is supposed to do get you to think. The sculpture also Reconstructed the hands and what was an educated gas on how the hands looked before something happened to them. One hand is for fearlessness and the other one is for generosity. The people who Destroyed the Buddha thought they were fearless, and also being generous by relieving us of Blasphemous imagery. I true Democracy allows for everyone’s faith. A treat democracy allows for everyone to live their lives fully. That is everyone. That needs to be taken in fully and reflected on. No one person as long as they’re not harming anyone else should be excluded from the world. If we all accepted, everyone is our neighbors and the true sense of a neighbor, we would be following Jesus, the Buddha, and any other great person or idea. I’ll lead to the same thing. When me truly are trying to be good people, we see that being good is being radical. There’s Everything right about making everyone’s lives better. Bettering everyone’s lives seems like an ultimate truth as well and those ultimate truth or what get us in a lot of trouble. The ultimate truth of treating others as you would want to be treated goes for everyone.
Why should we ever cast judgment on others unless they are harming others? The ultimate truth, which is an absolute truth, which is what gets us in trouble has to be an absolute truth for everyone not just one select group and that one ultimate truth is doing no harm! Harm happens when we do not give the same rights to others as we give to ourselves.
What a great sculpture, indeed. I’m hoping to visit it soon.
